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Do Americans still believe in mass protest? Or do we just not know of any other possible mechanism, outside voting, for achieving social change? When we take to the streets—which we still do, in great numbers—do we expect something to come of it, or are we out there simply because our understanding of American history tells us that this is what we are supposed to do next?

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother and American citizen, at the hands of an ICE agent, this past Wednesday, took place less than a mile away from where George Floyd was murdered, in Minneapolis, in May, 2020. That proximity is merely a staggering, tragic coincidence; still, it serves as a reminder that state violence is never merely local, especially if it is captured on camera and spread across the internet. Americans anywhere have little protection against police officers kneeling on our necks or masked federal agents storming our neighborhoods; every time we see it, many of us realize that we could be next.

Good’s and Floyd’s killings were separated also by roughly five and a half years, a span that has cast a strange, spectral feel over the news, as if some important and potentially world-changing rage has returned to haunt us, though we can’t quite make out its contours. Could people take to the streets again, like they did in 2020? Do we remember the tear-gassing, the fires, the movement of crowds under street lights? Why does it seem as though those events took place a lifetime ago? Do we even live in the same country that we did then?

As with the murder of George Floyd, the killing of Renee Good occurred after a period of elevated street protest in America, much of it, this time, about ICE and the Trump Administration specifically. And just as the video of Floyd’s murder provided a clear and unmistakable illustration of what the years of Black Lives Matter protests which had preceded it were addressing, the footage of a masked agent firing into a car driven by a mother has confirmed all the mounting fears about what happens when unchecked, extralegal, and largely untrained military forces are set loose in an American city. Someone was always going to get killed on video.

At this point, less than a week after Good’s killing, one can discern the beginning stages of the mass mobilization we saw in 2020, with marches springing up in cities across the country. But, to date, we have not seen an outpouring of spontaneous street action on the scale that we saw back then. There are many possible reasons that Minnesota, in particular, has remained relatively quiet. First, there’s the weather: street demonstrations in America wax and wane with the seasons; summer is usually the period of highest activity, especially in places with brutal winters. People might also be frightened after watching Good get shot in the face and then hearing the Vice-President effectively give ICE agents permission to do what they please. And, perhaps most important, the 2020 protests took place during the height of the pandemic, and they fed off the restlessness of an entire country that had been locked inside and wanted to go out and feel something.

But many Minnesotans might also no longer be sure if protests today will lead to change. If this is the case, their hesitancy is likely shared by many of their fellow-Americans who, in the past year, have dutifully shown up to large-scale marches around the country, such as “No Kings” day, but who do not appear to expect anything more from these mass gatherings than an opportunity to vent and to feel camaraderie and kinship.

The truth is that, thanks to the two-party system, relative economic comfort, and basic stability, many of us in America do not have much in the way of political imagination. Nostalgia certainly plays a role in our limited view—we are always re-creating the marches we learned about in history class—but it’s increasingly clear that the internet and social media also have a diluting effect on dissent, creating the illusion of strength through volume while somehow watering down everything in the process. We can tweet, go protest, and vote. That’s about it.

During the past fifteen or so years, we have seen a handful of revolutions-that-weren’t, from the Arab Spring to the summer of George Floyd to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Today, we are watching yet another insurrectionary moment in the streets of Iran. The ceding of nearly all communication to the internet might be generating a pattern of online flareups followed by enormous, stirring street protests. What remains unclear, as chronicled by Vincent Bevins in his excellent book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” is what happens after the streets empty and people go back to their phones. Bevins, who published the book in 2023, argued that what we have seen so far, at least, is that the protests fail to achieve much in terms of material or political goals and are followed by periods of intense backlash and repression.

Before Good was killed in Minneapolis, I was already thinking about Bevins’s book, as the sabres rattled after the capture of the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro. The Trump Administration, through some cockeyed revision of the Monroe Doctrine, seems eager to stake a claim to the entire Western Hemisphere. After Maduro’s capture, the Trump War Room account on X posted a cartoon of the President straddling North and South America with a big stick reading “Donroe Doctrine” in his hand. A litany of possible military targets emerged throughout the week, communicated via leaks, press conferences, and statements from the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and from Donald Trump himself. Greenland, Colombia, and Cuba have all been named as places that should be on high alert for some measure of American military expedition. (Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, said this week that, after speaking with Trump, the U.S. would not be invading her country.) A year ago, the invasion of Greenland felt like a joke, or, at worst, a sign of Trump’s deteriorating grip on reality. Today, it seems inevitable that America will seize Greenland from Denmark and will then turn its eye back to Central and South America. Congress appears utterly incapable of restraining the Administration’s adventurism, and condemnation from foreign leaders seems only to add new names to the list of America’s enemies.

The public, according to polls, does not support the President’s expansionism. Only a third of respondents in a recent poll approved of the operation to capture Maduro; around nine in ten said that the Venezuelan people, not the United States, should control who governs them. On a broader level, Trump and Rubio’s imperialist aims cut against the priorities of the vast majority of their constituents: only twenty-seven per cent of respondents polled in September wanted the U.S. to take a “more active role” to “solve the world’s problems.” Readers of this column know that I’m skeptical of opinion polling—except when results are more or less uniform and conform to a coherent picture of the electorate. In this case, a country that endured seemingly unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that has watched the wars in Ukraine and Gaza extract incalculable humanitarian and financial tolls might be wary of military interventionism.

ICE is not popular, either. A few hours before Good was killed, YouGov released a poll showing that only thirty-nine per cent of Americans approved of how the agency was doing its job. Regardless of what you think about the laws concerning justifiable force—which, in any case, have been muddied by ICE’s wanton disregard for due process and for normal law-enforcement procedures—there was no reason for an agent to fire multiple times into a car that was travelling at a modest speed and seemed to be trying to move out of the agents’ way. The attempt by Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist” has only fuelled public indignation. Lies will not convince Americans who watched an ordinary person get executed by a panicked federal agent in a mask. Even those who believe that Good should not have been impeding law enforcement are unlikely to support what Noem seemed to be doing, which was celebrating the death of a supposed terrorist.

Foreign policy might remain abstract for most of the public, but, as more Americans come in contact with ICE agents in their cities and towns, I believe that there will be an even sharper negative swing against a President who already is within range of becoming the most unpopular in history. One of the more stirring news segments I watched about Minnesota featured a young man who had watched ICE agents pull Good’s body out of her car. He looked traumatized while talking to a reporter, and said, “I’m pretty right-leaning, but this is not how we’re supposed to do things in America.”

So what can any of us do about this? We seem to have stumbled into an uneasy paradox: millions of people are willing to participate in widespread protests, but few appear to believe that they will lead to much change. Do such people join a community group that tries to alert their neighbors when ICE is coming? Perhaps engage in a bit of civil disobedience? Or do we merely protest in the same way that we always do, with an understanding, perhaps, that this might be exactly what the Trump Administration wants—to provoke a riot in the same city that sparked off the summer of George Floyd?

I do not believe that the majority of Americans think Renee Good deserved to be shot in the face. Even fewer want American bombs dropping all over the globe, leaving a mess that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars to fix while oil executives get invited to meetings at the White House to split up the spoils. We are not that depraved yet. But this is the first time in recent memory in which the will of the majority feels both irrelevant and totally impotent. There are three years left of this Administration. Do we really believe that a blue wave in the midterms and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate can stop ICE from invading American cities? If Trump doesn’t ask permission from Congress now, why would he ask when it is filled with what he calls enemies of the state?

What we are seeing in this moment of crisis, then, is a collision between the deep disaffection that many liberal voters felt after the 2024 election and the desperate need to do something. It would be a mistake to conflate this feeling of constriction with hopelessness, or even passivity. As Trump deploys more agents to American cities, more brutal scenes will emerge, and more people will take to the streets—even if they fear rioting, repression by ICE agents, and yet another failed, ephemeral revolution. A large-scale conflagration feels almost unavoidable and could change the course of the country’s history. There is no clever political parlor trick or stirring message that can change whatever it is that’s coming, for the simple reason that Americans, by tradition and disposition, do not respond well to thousands of federal masked agents running around their neighborhoods. Will resistance find a new form in this moment? Maybe, but I’m not sure that it would matter. The past decade may have shown the limits of the American liberal political imagination, but we have to work with what we know, and hope that it goes better this time. What other choice do we have? ♦

Over decades of travel to Iran, I’ve regularly returned to symbolic sites of the Islamic Revolution as a way of assessing the national mood. One is the ornate mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which features a huge golden dome and four spiny minarets visible for miles, a sprawling parking lot with space for twenty thousand vehicles, and a mall of souvenir shops and kebab restaurants. The shrine remained well attended during official government events, but, as the years went on, I noticed fewer and fewer visitors—usually tourists and Shiite pilgrims, plus the “dusters” in charge of cleaning the elaborate enclosure in which the Imam is buried. I have also routinely attended Friday prayers at the University of Tehran, where senior clerics, and occasionally the Supreme Leader, give the sermon. Over time, the crowds got older and older.

“It is almost impossible to keep the revolutionary élan alive and to transmit it down generational lines,” Anne O’Donnell, a historian at New York University, told me. “There’s something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them.” But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria “has a shelf life, a time stamp.”

It’s been almost a half century since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi boarded the royal Boeing 727 at Tehran’s airport for an extended “vacation.” He reportedly wept while bidding farewell to his staff and inner coterie, and took a vessel of Iranian soil with him. At that point, after fourteen months of nationwide protests, his exile seemed inevitable, the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now the theocracy that succeeded his rule is in its third generation—and in its own desperate struggle to survive.

After two weeks of anti-government demonstrations in all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces, more than five hundred people have reportedly been killed, and thousands more have been detained. “The Iranian regime has faced and brutally repressed repeated rounds of popular uprisings since 2009,” Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, posted on X. “Never has it struggled with the kind of perfect storm it’s sailed itself into.”

Iranians have plenty of reasons to feel angry, betrayed, vulnerable, or insecure. In the last two decades, several major protests have erupted. In 2009, millions took to the streets in a series of demonstrations dubbed the Green Movement over alleged political fraud in a Presidential election. Between 2017 and 2019, the soaring costs of basic items sparked protests in dozens of cities. (The price of fuel, managed in part by a government subsidy, rose by three hundred per cent.) In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for improperly covering her hair, produced the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, led largely by young women. The current protests erupted on December 28th, after merchants in Tehran’s lofty Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops as the value of the rial, the national currency, went into free fall. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, a dollar could be exchanged for roughly seventy rials; this month, a dollar bought 1.4 million. Annual inflation has exceeded forty per cent, and soared to seventy-two per cent for food. The revolution was carried out in the name of “the oppressed,” but Iran’s population has almost tripled since then, and the government has been increasingly unsuccessful in feeding, housing, educating, and employing them.

Politically, the regime has rotted from within, discarding, discrediting, or detaining its own kind. Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said that the turning point happened last Thursday, January 9th, the beginning of the Iranian weekend and the sabbath, when vast crowds joined the protests. “That’s the point where people saw each other,” he told me. (Kadivar’s father, Mohsen, was an outspoken critic who was imprisoned at Evin Prison and now teaches at Duke University. His aunt, Jamileh, was a reformist Member of Parliament who was put on trial for attending a conference in Berlin and banned from running for a second term. She now lives in London.)

The ideology invoked to justify Iran’s revolution has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of accusations of voter fraud in the 2009 election, which put a hard-liner in power, according to Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina sociologist and the author of “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.” Since then, “people just didn’t buy what a leader was saying anymore, and were looking for a way out,” he said. Iranians have occasionally rallied around reformist candidates, but they, too, have been undermined by hard-line revolutionary purists. “Many Iranians who share the ideals and goals of the reformist movement no longer believe that reform is going to lead to those goals,” Kurzman said.

During an event at the Atlantic Council on Friday, Rob Macaire, a former British Ambassador to Iran, said that the regime in Tehran “does not have the answers to any of the challenges that it’s facing.” The inner circle of power has become “tighter and tighter,” so the government “finds it very difficult to do anything other than to circle the wagons and to double down on a repressive policy.” Guy Burgess, a sociologist who studies conflict and co-founded the blog Beyond Intractability, said that prospects of the Islamic regime collapsing have increased. “These are the sort of things that happen when, all of a sudden, people decide that the brutal force that kept the regime in power can be overcome.”

But the Islamic Republic still has the forces—in the hundreds of thousands—to repress the current uprising. And it has been ruthless. Videos circulating online from one medical center showed a computer screen displaying digital images of the deceased in its morgue for families to identify. Other videos published on social media have shown the dead zipped up in black body bags, laid outdoors for families to claim. The BBC quoted Iranian medical staff who described people blinded by pellets, a tactic used by Egyptian security forces during the Arab Spring, in 2011.

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, much will depend on sentiment within these security forces. In June of last year, Israel and the U.S. destroyed military installations and nuclear sites in Iran and killed key leaders and scientists, leaving the Iranian military feeling vulnerable. In addition, the rank and file share the same (increasingly existential) economic challenges faced by most Iranians. While the security forces are often lumped into an ideological monolith, there is a wide diversity among their members, as nearly all men are required to serve. Some opt to join the Revolutionary Guard because they get off earlier in the day than conventional soldiers, and thus can earn money at a second job. For others, having the I.R.G.C. on their résumés helps them later when applying for jobs in government or at government-funded universities.

O’Donnell noted that a critical juncture in the fall of the Berlin Wall was when upper-level officials in East Germany were no longer assured that the Soviet Union had their backs. Mid-level officials, in turn, were no longer convinced that their superiors would protect them. “So then they started to ask questions whether they should fire on crowds or not and think to themselves, ‘I’m certainly not going to put my neck out if no one’s going to cover me,’ ” she said. Ultimately, the erosion of morale at mid-level positions was what ended Communist rule in East Germany. “It was very unexpected.” Burgess added, “Once you get to the point where some of the regime’s forces decide that they’d be better off siding with the uprising, then the regime collapses quickly, and you find guys like [the former Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad suddenly finding new housing in Russia.”

The first generation of Iranian revolutionaries—including octogenarians like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—have long fooled themselves about their future. In September, during the U.N. General Assembly, I was part of a group of journalists and scholars who met with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a political centrist, at a hotel in New York. He explained that the U.S. and Israel wrongly believed that, after the attacks in June, “people would take to the street and things would come to an end.” This assumption, he argued, did not “understand the Islamic Republic.” But on Sunday, faced with nationwide protests, he had to acknowledge his government’s shortcomings. “Our responsibility is to solve and address people’s grievances,” he said in an interview on Iranian state television. Other government officials have branded the demonstrators “terrorists,” which qualifies them for the death penalty.

The main obstacle for the protesters is that they have not yet formed a cohesive movement with an easily articulated goal. Nor have they established infrastructure or announced some form of centralized leadership. As with the Arab Spring, which toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen but failed to establish democratic governments or address economic inequality, protesters in Iran know what they are opposing but haven’t landed on a viable alternative. In the short term, any action taken by the Trump Administration may do little to provide clarity to the situation. On Saturday, the President posted on Truth Social, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Later, Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a golfing buddy of the President, posted that the Iranians’ “long nightmare” was “soon coming to a close.” He continued, “President Trump understands Iran will never be great with the ayatollah and his henchmen in charge. To all who are sacrificing in Iran, God bless. Help is on the way.”

Another site I’ve often visited while in Tehran is the Paradise of Zahra—or Behesht-e Zahra, in Farsi—the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city. A big section of the graveyard is devoted to “martyrs” from the eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Martyrdom, a commitment to die fighting for justice, has been central to Shiite Islam since the seventh century. Over the weekend, CNN and other media posted a video of mourners carrying the body of a protester into the Paradise of Zahra for burial. The mourners shouted, “Death to Khamenei” and “I will kill the one who killed my brother.” Security forces reportedly used tear gas to disperse them. A new generation of martyrs is being created. ♦

France has granted citizenship to Hollywood star George Clooney. . . . Clooney told RTL that he was attempting to learn French using the language app Duolingo, but confessed that it was not easy at his age.—New York Times.

Je suis un homme.

Je suis un homme célèbre.

Duo, sais-tu qui je suis?

J’habite dans un château. Le château est grand.

Duo, où est mon château?

Je suis acteur.

Je suis plus qu’acteur.

J’ai une entreprise de tequila.

Je bois un verre de tequila avec mon collègue Rande Gerber.

Voulez-vous un verre de tequila?

Je vais à la bibliothèque avec mon ami Brad Pitt.

Brad Pitt est mon ami.

Julia Roberts est aussi mon amie.

J’ai beaucoup d’amis.

Joe Biden était mon ami, mais il n’est plus mon ami maintenant.

Je vais à la boulangerie avec mes amis Brad Pitt et Julia Roberts, mais je n’y vais pas avec Joe Biden.

Joe Biden est très, très vieux.

Ce n’est pas bon d’être vieux.

J’ai les cheveux gris, mais je ne suis pas vieux.

J’ai soixante-quatre ans, mais ma femme a quarante-sept ans.

Joe Biden est vieux et je ne suis pas vieux.

Qui est le Président des États-Unis maintenant?

Donald Trump est le Président des États-Unis.

Je suis français.

Ma famille est française.

Nous n’habitons pas aux États-Unis.

Où est le Trump Kennedy Centre?

Je ne sais pas où est le Trump Kennedy Centre.

Je suis français. ♦

In Memoriam

Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay about her terminal leukemia was the clearest and bravest account of confronting death that I have ever read (“A Further Shore,” December 8th). “When you are dying . . . you start remembering everything,” she tells us. She goes on to relate a gallery of vivid memories—some old, many new. Thanks to the immediacy of her writing, I’m sure that Schlossberg’s extraordinary account will remain with many readers for a long time to come.

Jane Kite
Cambridge, Mass.

I just retired from nursing after fifty years and tens of thousands of patient encounters. Schlossberg’s essay—and especially her description of her nurses’ kindness—brought me to tears. I was a recipient of nursing care only once, five years ago, when I was recovering from a surgery for lymphoma. Sometimes, when I can’t fall asleep, I indulge in my memories of a young nurse who positioned and repositioned me, with endless patience and gentleness.

I want to thank Schlossberg for advocating for nurses and cancer patients, and for holding her cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., accountable for what he is doing to health care in this country. The inspiration she has given to the rest of us will live on.

Kathleen Wade
New York City

Like many others, I was stunned and saddened to read Schlossberg’s essay. I am a high-school English teacher, and I included Schlossberg’s book, “Inconspicuous Consumption,” on my syllabus when I taught A.P. Language. I found that Schlossberg’s focus on consumer choices offered an unusually accessible and resonant way for teen-agers to think about the climate crisis. Her book also provided one of the few genuine bright spots I experienced while teaching during the pandemic. In the fall of 2020, when I taught on Zoom, a small group of my students read “Inconspicuous Consumption” and designed a lesson on it for our class. Much like the headlines, the book’s topic was sobering, yet the students’ lesson—which opened with a Jeopardy game they had designed, based on the book’s subject matter—offered us a rare moment of connection, humor, and joy. I’m sure there are countless stories like this, of lives that have been enriched by Schlossberg’s work.

Elizabeth Sher
Somerville, Mass.

The Stakes of History

In his essay about the origins of incarceration, Adam Gopnik shows himself to be a subtle reader of Michel Foucault and his critics (Books, December 15th). Discussing a new book that challenges Foucault’s claim, put forth in his landmark 1975 work “Discipline and Punish,” that incarceration is a distinctly modern form of punishment, Gopnik provides an insightful account of Foucault’s greater ambitions. Foucault did not want simply to write a history of prisons but to produce an account of how power circulates in modern society—not merely through the carceral system but also in universities, medical institutions, the workplace, and the military.

As part of this effort, Foucault articulated a vision of history as composed of distinct “governing structures of thought,” or “epistemes,” in which weighty terms like “humanity” were redefined by the power pulsing through these institutions. Gopnik argues that Foucault’s understanding of history can undermine our ability to learn from the ancients, because it impedes us from seeing our history as continuous with theirs. Periodizing the past in this way makes “even our efforts at reform begin to feel like the latest round in an unwinnable, ageless struggle with power.” But that is, of course, a point made by Angela Davis, and many other prison abolitionists today who are influenced by Foucault: that the reform of the prison has always been part of a program that produces new prisons, jails, and, now, ICE detention facilities. “Reform” means breathing new life into these institutions.

Civilization has overcome, and not simply reformed, many inhuman practices that had been prevalent since antiquity. Now is no time for backsliding on the prison. It is important not to let our love of the ancients—which I confess I share—get in the way of making a more radical break in history. In this age of mass incarceration, immigration detention, deportations, and the rise of extreme-right-wing politics, it is especially important to look forward and strive for a new episteme. That, I take it, is what is really at stake in these renewed debates over Foucault.

Bernard E. Harcourt
Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties
Columbia University
New York City

Ancient Spectators

John Seabrook, in his excellent piece on the gentrification of stadiums, credits their “basic typology” to the Roman Colosseum (“Only Fans,” December 8th). He goes on to say that the Colosseum’s “naming rights, of a sort, went to Nero, whose giant bronze colossus stood nearby.” This may be strictly true, but the Colosseum’s construction actually served to erase Nero’s legacy from the Roman cityscape. This was intentional. Nero’s successor Vespasian commissioned the stadium to be built on the site of Nero’s pleasure gardens, the Domus Aurea, in part to return to citizens land that Nero had appropriated for his personal use. And, to emphasize the point, Vespasian also ordered that the head of Nero’s colossus be replaced—with, some believe, his own likeness. In an era when the Baltimore Orioles’ owner has commissioned a giveaway bobblehead of himself, the Colosseum’s history is as relevant as ever.

Thomas Leslie
Ralph E. Johnson Professor of Design
Illinois School of Architecture
Champaign, Ill.

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